Tag: You’re Doing it Wrong

I Don’t Think the Pentagon Understands How the Internet Works

Read this headline and tell me if you think the Pentagon has a basic understanding of the Internet:

Pentagon demands Wikileaks return Afghanistan documents

Wikileaks can return whatever the Hell they want but that doesn’t stop the harsh reality that thousands of copies have already been made. Welcome to the present.

Have I Got a Deal for You

I just found a great deal through Snowflakes in Hell and thought I’d share. There is a little sandwich shop that will give you two sandwiches (because I’m not calling them hoagies), a bag of chips, and a soda for the price of a firearm! With a sweet deal like that how could you pass it up? Apparently everybody has though:

Feeling compelled to do something, Pagliarella offered two hoagies, a soda and chips for each firearm brought to the store last week.

“I was hoping we would get one [gun], save one life and have one less gun on the street,” Pagliarella said.

But they received none.

Gee I can’t imagine why.

The Kindle Violates Civil Rights

I must write too much about the Kindle because every possible story involving my favorite little device gets e-mailed to me en masse. No I’m not complaining, let me thank those of you who e-mail this stuff because it’s always good. But this story boarders on stupid as shit.

Apparently in lieu of having real things to do the Justice Department threatened universities with lawsuits for taking part in the trials to see if Kindles would be a good replacement for text books. Their reasoning? Because the Kindle violates the civil rights of the blind.

It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. “If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that’s fine,” says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. “But other than that, there was really no way to use it.”

Emphasis mine. Why do I emphasis that? Because the Kindle has a text-to-speech feature while real books fucking don’t! OK the menus are not text-to-speech but it could be added in trivially and honestly a blind person could memorize the series of clicks and movements to activate the features. Even though the feature isn’t perfect (or even close) it’s still far better than regular fucking books which the universities were looking to replace.

Instead of looking to lawsuits maybe those idiots should have contacted Amazon and offered to help improve the text-to-speech functionality. Oh and this makes sense:

The Civil Rights Division informed the schools they were under investigation. In subsequent talks, the Justice Department demanded the universities stop distributing the Kindle; if blind students couldn’t use the device, then nobody could. The Federation made the same demand in a separate lawsuit against Arizona State.

So if blind people can’t use books than nobody can? That should save students buckets of money right there! Maybe this is the Obama administration’s solution to lower the cost of education. As usual the government isn’t actually representing the people they claim to be:

It’s an approach that bothers some civil rights experts. “As a blind person, I would never want to be associated with any movement that punished sighted students, particularly for nothing they had ever done,” says Russell Redenbaugh, a California investor who lost his sight in a childhood accident and later served for 15 years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “It’s a gross injustice to disadvantage one group, and it’s bad policy that breeds resentment, not compassion.”

That’s right actual blind people don’t want this, the government pretending to represent them does. Oh and get this:

One obvious solution to the problem, of course, was to fix the Kindle. Early on, Amazon told federation officials it would apply text-to-speech technology to the Kindle’s menu and function keys. And sure enough, last week the company announced a new generation of Kindles that are fully accessible to the blind. While the Justice Department was making demands, and Perez was making speeches, the market was working.

Wow who would have thought that would happen? Anybody? It’s good to see all of your hands are up. You don’t need to pull out a lawsuit when the company is more than happen to correct the problem for its potential customers.

One of the major advantages to e-book readers over regular books is they can be made accessible to people with disabilities. You can never made a real book read to you but you can make an electronic device read text to you.

Send Out the Lawyers

So apparently Professor John Abraham of St. Thomas college put up some kind of online rebuttal to a person who I’ve mentioned previously, Christopher Monckton. The rebuttal is over Mr. Monckton’s presentation on Al Gore’s Apocalypse, which is actually very interesting to watch (I have a video of it embedded in the previously linked page). Well being British and still being willing to sling insults (however childish it may be but alas I haven’t watched either Professor Abraham or Monckton’s rebuttal to that video). Apparently according to the Red Star (which means you need to take it with a grain of salt) Monckton said the following:

For his part, Monckton has fired back in a YouTube interview clip, calling Abraham “a wretched little man,” the University of St. Thomas “a half-assed Catholic bible college,” and its president, the Rev. Dennis Dease, “a creep.”

The one thing I really do like about the British are their insults. So what is the rebuttal to that onslaught? Well St. Thomas is calling in the lawyers:

St. Thomas officials have defended Abraham’s efforts, and the school’s lawyers have gone beyond that. In a letter to Monckton, St. Thomas attorney Phyllis Karasov threatened legal action if Monckton does not “immediately cease and desist making any further disparaging or defamatory comments about the University of St. Thomas, President Father Dease, Professor Abraham, the Archdioceses of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, or anyone else associated with the University.”

This is the reason I’m so skeptical about this whole Al Gore’s Apocalypse thing. If somebody criticizes the “science” (and I use that term very lightly) behind global warming climate change lawyers are called out. Also it appears as thought St. Thomas University doesn’t understand the first amendment and the freedom of speech. For instance I can call St. Thomas University a shitty Hell hold that would be better off turned into a crater in the ground that continue to be used as a college. I can also say all their administrative staff are total assholes and can go sodomize themselves with retractable batons. It’s called the freedom of speech and insults are covered under it.

Finger Pointing at It’s Finest

Let’s say you’re a multi-billion dollar technology company who puts out a phone almost everybody seems to want. Now let’s say you release a new phone which has a slight problem, it drops calls when being held in a user’s left hand. What do you do? Well you could recall the phone or offer an in-store hardware fix.

Or if you’re Apple you could point the finger at everybody else and claim you’re phone is still good because everybody has similar issues. I guess I do like one thing about that page, it shows the Jesus Phone isn’t actually better than other phones on the market. Apple zealots always claim Apple makes hardware that’s far better than the competition but in actuality that’s just a total pile of shit (yes they make nice hardware, but so do many other companies).

Cue the Sad Trombone

Remember that pay wall Rupert Murdoch is tossing up on all the “news” sites he owns? Remember all that bitching about freeloading Internet users no longer getting a free lunch? Remember how this was going to monetize the news industry and turn a profit? Well not so much. Via Dvorak Uncensored it appears as though not many people are subscribing to the London Time’s website:

After a month of forced free registrations and two weeks of a full paywall, Dan Sabbagh at Beehivecity.com says these are the numbers:

Apparently, the 15,000 paid subscriptions figure is considered “disappointing.”

That may sound like a lot but really isn’t not enough to pay for anything:

At 2 pounds a week, the average online subscriber would produce 100 pounds of revenue a year. 150,000 of them would produce 15 million pounds of revenue.

15 million pounds of revenue would be nice for a company used to living on, say, $5 million of revenue. But it wouldn’t even begin to offset the cost of the Times’ huge newsroom.

Meanwhile, what has the new paywall done to online traffic? So far, it has dropped by two-thirds. That, apparently, is actually better than expected. One editor feared it would collapse by 90%.

So what did Murdoch’s pay wall accomplish? A complete obliteration of online traffic and probably destroyed any chance of making a reason for advertisers to pay for in-site ads. Nice job dumb ass. I hope getting hit with the clue stick hurt.

It’s practically impossible to provide a free service and later turn it into a pay service. Almost everybody who has attempted to do as such has failed pretty miserably. The other thing to remember is the fact it’s very difficult to get customers to pay for a service that is provided free elsewhere (and even more difficult when those free sources are better than the pricey one).

He Gets an ‘A’ for Effort

Sometimes criminals deserve a little nod for creativity. Take Daryl Simon who was a fraudster and facing prison time. In the hopes of getting leniency in his sentencing he tried showing the court he was a good Samaritan by photoshopping himself helping people attending physical therapy.

That takes balls… and a heaping helping of stupidity. It appears his Photoshop-fu is weak as he was caught. For punishment at being bad at Photoshop he received an additional 50 months to his sentence. Still funny though.

Only in Russia

So I hit up the BBC to see what’s going around in the world and I come across the best headline ever in the European section:

Scores of Russians have died in the past few weeks amid a heatwave – many drowning after drinking too much vodka.

That’s a headline I would expect on the Onion. Anyways without context that’s hilarious but with context it seems Russians are going swimming in lakes and rivers due to the heat but drowning because they’re actually too drunk to swim. Now that I think about it it’s funny even with context.

Serves Them Right

You know what’s my favorite feature of my new Evo 4G? It’s the fact I can hold it in my left hand and still have a signal! If you’ve been watching any technology news lately you know Apple is having some problems with the newest version of their Jesus Phone. See if you hold the phone in a certain way which many people do when just normally talking on the device the Jesus Phone 4 loses signal and the call is dropped. Steve Job’s solution was to tell one upset customer to stop holding it that way. Yup it’s your fault for wanting to hold the phone in your left hand you stupid peasant.

The Jesus Phone 4 is also having problems with the proximity sensor which prevents random shit from being pressed when the phone’s screen is connected to your phone. This problem isn’t as big since in order to experience it you must be talking on the phone and that doesn’t seem to be a feature of the newest model.

Well Apple is now holding a special Jesus Phone 4 press conference tomorrow. There are two possibilities here; they are going to address the recent troubles with their new phone, or they’re going to unviel the new white version of their new phone. Hopefully it’s the latter.

As much as I like Apple’s computers I don’t really like anything else they produce (especially their fucking wireless access point, it can go die in a fire). In the case of the iPad I just don’t like Apple’s draconian control over it but in the case of their new phone I don’t like the idea of a phone that doesn’t work in my left hand. Either way all this karma serves them right.